Tuesday, December 03, 2013

Lots and hype and hyperbole about Amazon.com this week. At least Scott Pelley at 60mins went right to the top and managed to keep his hands clean. As you probably know by now, Amazon is going to deliver your toys to you with a toy helicopter.

Amazon is the world's largest
online retailer, serving 225M customers worldwide. What's next for the
company that prides itself on disrupting tradition? Charlie Rose
interviews Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos.

Other reporters tried out the drudgery of working in a warehouse to see how they were treated. Guardian.

For a week, I was an Amazon elf: a temporary worker who got a job
through a Swansea employment agency – though it turned out I wasn't the
only journalist who happened upon this idea. Last Monday, BBC's Panorama
aired a programme that featured secret filming from inside the same
warehouse. I wonder for a moment if we have committed the ultimate media
absurdity and the show's undercover reporter, Adam Littler, has
secretly filmed me while I was secretly interviewing him. He didn't, but
it's not a coincidence that the heat is on the world's most successful
online business. Because Amazon is the future of shopping; being an
Amazon "associate" in an Amazon "fulfilment centre" – take that for
doublespeak, Mr Orwell – is the future of work; and Amazon's payment of
minimal tax in any jurisdiction is the future of global business. A
future in which multinational corporations wield more power than
governments.

Instead, I think Bezos is up to something much more practical. By
unveiling a huge drone program in progress, he's sending a message to
the FAA regulators and Senate committees who are currently considering how unmanned aircraft can be used commercially. And that message is: Don't even think about getting in our way.
By floating a teaser about the drone program, and allowing the public
to freak out about it, he's showing regulators how popular such a scheme
would be, and how much backlash they'd face if they outlawed it.

Also, NYMag will now go to bi-monthly printing rather than weekly. There's an iPad version.

"New York has evolved dramatically since its founding in 1968,
with its intelligence, humor, playfulness, and visual punch remaining
constants," editor-in-chief Adam Moss said in a statement. "Readers will
continue to find what they love in the magazine, and we're undertaking
these new changes to meet their changing media habits on all platforms." The company did not address any financial reasons for its print publishing cuts in the statement. Nymag.com will have a new science blog, and more photography and political and cultural coverage, according to New York Media.

The
elderly who die today still leave behind an attic full of relics for
children and grandchildren to rifle through: boxes of love letters and
photos documenting the family history. But increasingly, such
memorabilia is password-protected and stored online. Many wedding albums
exist only on Flickr. The history of courtship and falling in love
among today’s young newlyweds is documented on Facebook and in text messages.

“Look how awful people are when they fight over the couch or
dad’s graduation ring,” says Josh Slocum, president of the Funeral
Consumers Alliance, an advocacy group. “I can only imagine what the
fight will look like over dad’s computer files.”
In the US, such questions fall into the messy intersection
of state property laws, federal privacy laws and corporate policies of
the companies housing online accounts.

A handful of US states have passed laws addressing the treatment of digital remains.
In Oklahoma and Idaho, digital data are treated like tangible property.
The executor of a will can take control of social networking or email
accounts the same as bank accounts and houses, and decide to continue
operating them or shut them down. In Indiana, a law allows access to
those accounts but not control. In Rhode Island and Connecticut, only
access to email accounts is covered.

The Atlantic notes the awarding to Oren Teicher as PW Person of the Year:

This year's selection for PW's Person of the Year
represents a wholly different approach to the honor. It is Oren Teicher,
CEO of the American Booksellers Association, and the ABA's board of
directors, the organization that represents the country's independent
book stores. The fact that these traditional brick-and-mortar, mainly
locally owned bookstores are being recognized as outstanding
contributors to publishing is not merely a sympathetic gesture to
old-fashioned commerce in a generally downward trajectory. The accolade
is justified by results defying the odds that so heavily favor the
Amazon juggernaut and the chain stores, still led by (the struggling)
Barnes & Noble.

From Twitter;
Yahoo’s Flickr Resurgence Continues With Handsome Photo Books, But Reliance On Sets Could Stumble TechcrunchPrompt.ly Raises $1.5M Seed To Become The OpenTable For Time And Services TechcrunchBecksistentialism: because man is a goal-seeking animal TheConversation

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Michael Cairns

I enjoy discussing the publishing industry and in particular the changes that impact the business. On PND, I don't write about everything, just the things that interest me.

My career spans a wide range of publishing and information products, services and B2B categories and my operating and consulting experience has largely been with brand-name companies such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Macmillan, Inc., Berlitz International, AARP, R.R. Bowker and Wolters Kluwer.

I have served as a board member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and in addition to my responsibilities at R.R. Bowker, l also served as Chairman of the International ISBN Executive Committee.